Trending searches

Trending backends: RPC and RSS

Google exposes trending searches two ways. They are not interchangeable, so backend lets you pick:

	"rpc" (batchexecute)	"rss" (feed)
items	50	10
payload	~2 KB JSON	~21 KB XML
growth % and volume	✅	❌ — buckets like "2000+"
news articles	❌	✅
window selection	✅	ignored by Google
worldwide	✅	❌ country only

const rss = await tf.trendingNow(Region.US, { backend: "rss" });
rss.source; // "rss"
rss.results[0].articles;
// [{ title: "...", url: "https://...", source: "Buffalo News", picture: "https://..." }]

"auto" (the default) tries the RPC and falls back to the feed. The RPC comes first deliberately: it returns five times the items with real growth figures, so defaulting to RSS would quietly degrade results. Reach for "rss" when you want the articles — that is the one thing the RPC cannot give you — or as a second opinion if the RPC id ever goes stale.

Note that the feed is not a lighter path despite being a feed, and Google ignores hours, sort and count on it: it always returns the same 10 entries.

Trending now

Google retired the hottrends/visualize/internal/data endpoint, along with api/dailytrends and api/realtimetrends; all three now return HTTP 404. This library calls the batchexecute RPC that trends.google.com itself uses instead — as does trendflow-py from 0.2.0 — and it returns more than the old endpoint did:

const trending = await tf.trendingNow(Region.US);
// { title: "fifa world cup 2026", growth: 3650, volume: 6, traffic: "+3,650%", articles: [] }

Three practical wins over the old endpoint:

• Growth and volume, not just titles. growth is the percentage rise over the window, volume a relative search-volume index.
• Any country code, not the 16 hardcoded names the old endpoint required — and worldwide works, which it previously refused.
• No cookie, and far looser rate limiting. This RPC answers on IPs that get a 429 from the widgetdata endpoints, so trendingNow() often works with no proxy at all.

articles is empty on this backend — the RPC carries no article links. Pass { backend: "rss" } to get the news articles behind each trend instead.

The window is selectable via TrendingWindow:

import { TrendingWindow } from "trendflow";

await tf.trendingNow(Region.US, { window: TrendingWindow.RISING }); // default: fastest-growing
await tf.trendingNow(Region.US, { window: TrendingWindow.TOP });    // highest-volume

window is an undocumented Google parameter. Only these two values have behaviour worth naming; other integers between 4 and 12 also return data over varying recency windows, and you can pass one as a raw number.

Not implemented: captcha-gated RPCs

The same batchexecute endpoint exposes a higher-precision timeseries (floating-point values rather than the rounded 0-100 the public API returns) and keyword-scoped related queries. Both require a reCAPTCHA Enterprise token and return an empty payload without one, so this library does not implement them — that data remains available through interestOverTime() and relatedQueries(), which use the documented widgetdata endpoints.